“Thar She Blows” Away

“Hi, I’m Barbara and I want to be a loser.”
Fortunately, unlike some meetings that evolve around healing addictions, Weight Watchers doesn’t require this sort of confession upon signup. There are few tales of high crimes and misdemeanors short of a “Cool Whip habit” and an occasional Kale recipe. At a ripe old age, this was a comfortable place for me. It will one day take me to place where I can honestly admit to being “height-weight proportional” on a Craigslist ad. I have sailed the stormy high seas of weight loss and I am now approaching a height tall enough to absorb my weight. Either that or I’ve lost an incredible 100 pounds — for the fourth time in my life.

On January 11, 2007, I navigated the five icy blocks from my home to the Northgate Weight Watchers meeting in a strip mall directly over the local Baskin-Robbins ice cream store. George W. Bush had just announced a “surge” in Iraq. In the biblical sense, I had already surged to a bloated weight of 25+ stones — enough stones to please a Taliban crowd at the condemnation of an adulteress. I was packing enough kilos to send a federal DEA squad into my apartment to quarantine me. More importantly, I weighed enough pounds and my blood sugar test scored high enough for my doctor to use the dreaded “I” word in a consultation. Until now, I would not be reduced. Say the words “Type 2 Diabetes” and I’ll follow you to a Weight Watchers meeting.
I was welcomed to my decennial weight loss program with smiles and Weight Watcher “high fives” — a radiant gold sticker awarded to those in the class who had lost at least five pounds. Baby steps! I could do that. Then there was the first 10 percent goal — for me losing 10 percent of my weight was as incomprehensible as shaving 10 percent off the National Debt. Still, no one seemed to mind that I was a repeat offender or the Baskin-Robbins French Vanilla ice cream cone which I was finishing off.
It didn’t take long to lose the ice cream cone and my first 50 pounds. The doctor said I should engage in activity more energizing than Googling exercise outfits on the Internet. Perhaps, he suggested, I could do a minimal 10-minute walk every day. Sure enough, I discovered, it was exactly a 10 minute walk from my front door to the Godiva Chocolates kiosk at the mall.
Eventually, as winter turned to Spring, and Spring into Summer of the first year, I discovered there were other places to walk. There was not only a Baskin-Robbins but a Haagen-Dazs near Greenlake. I had removed most of the toxic assets from my kitchen. Gone were the sugars, the breads, and the bratwurst. Here were the vegetables and the voluminous summer fruits. It was time for strawberries forever and water, water, everywhere.
That all worked out until another summer came. Exercise had gotten serious. I was no longer Googling exercise wear, but wearing it to the gym. Despite fears of “whale calls” like “Thar she blows” I had taken up the aquatic habits that kept me relatively slim in childhood. I lost another 25 pounds a year later. It was enough to make me look and feel like I was 10 years younger, until my body ended its free fall. Soon came the summer, fall, and winter of my discontent. My weight did not budge for six months. Considering my history, I should have been happy to maintain my weight for six months. Still, I was not yet near lowering my BMI from “mortally obese” to merely “obese.”
It took a week-long bout with the flu and many trips to the porcelain throne to break through the plateau this past Spring. Then it took a new pair of running shoes to shatter it.
The 100 pound loss is only a beginning. One day I will be standing at the pool yelling “Thar she blows!” to Calista Flockhart!